Where Is DeedDa?

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In March, Vanity Fair ran a splashy article about a new venture from a big media personality. Jane Pratt, the founder of defunct women's website xoJane, was launching a new site, called, oddly, DeedDa. The site would combine ecommerce and first-person confessional essays: 15 to 20 original pieces a day plus goods to sell, a la Ssense. Contributors named in the piece included Cher, Courteney Cox, Courtney Love, and xoJane breakout star Cat Marnell. The launch was planned for April.

Providing the funding was Carolyn Rafaelian, the erstwhile billionaire owner of jewelry brand Alex and Ani, which filed for bankruptcy in 2021. Rafaelian also owns mildly hoaxy jewelry brand Metal Alchemist, which claims to use “an unprecedented process” to forge “new, interactive metal that responds to your energy, emotion, and intent.”

My interest was piqued by the silly name, which Pratt says is a nickname for one of Rafaelian’s daughters. It seemed almost like parody, or an attempt to replicate Goop (Paltrow, famously: "a word that means nothing and could mean anything"). DeedDa, I kept saying? Deeeedddddaaaa? The business model also intrigued me. Affiliate links are not new, but they usually accompany copy that is explicitly about the product. I don’t see myself reading a confessional essay by Cher and then buying a bracelet but who knows, could work.

April came and went. The summer of smoke began. Canada was burning. Everyone seemed to forget the site but me. I navigated to DeedDa.com and found a placeholder: "It will be right here on June 7th. We want to give you an incentive to sign up for emails, but we haven’t gotten that far yet. If you do it now, though, we’ll send you something cool eventually." The site's favicon was still the WordPress logo.

I signed up and waited. I received nothing cool, nothing at all. In the meantime, I looked at DeedDa's social channels. To this day, they have under 100 followers on Twitter. They follow two accounts: Jane Pratt and Barnard Library and Academic Information Services. On Instagram, there was initially a sense of progress. There were pictures from an office in Tribeca. "DeedDa is coming," said one post. Another promised, "Original content and personal storytelling with some of your favorite characters of the past and new ones you will meet and love. Or not."

The final post on the account is from April 25th. It's a picture of a pair of Jimmy Choo pumps next to a pair of Chuck Taylors. "We're all about that ‘slipping into something more comfortable’ moment," it reads, followed by the sloth emoji. After that, nothing.

June 7th passed. The site didn’t launch, but the placeholder remained. What was going on, I wondered? Where was DeedDa?

Around the time that DeedDa was supposed to go live, I met a 28-year-old friend for coffee. I had DeedDa on the mind. DeedDa was obsessing me. “Do you know who Jane Pratt is?” I asked her. She did not. “XoJane?” Vague recognition…

For the 28-year-olds: Jane Pratt, now 60, founded two 90s women’s magazines, Sassy and Jane, and later launched the website xoJane.com with SAY Media. The latter was notorious for its confessional essays, under the banner of “It Happened To Me,” for which contributors were paid $50 each. Essay topics ranged from traumatic to sensational: My Former Friend’s Death Was A Blessing; My Rapist Friended Me On Facebook (And All I Got Was This Lousy Article); I Found a Ball of Cat Hair In My Vagina.

These pieces were a part of the personal essay boom of the 2000s and 2010s that helped shape a decade or more of digital media. Was the site exploitative? Some people think so. After it shut down in 2016, following an acquisition by Time Inc., former editor Mandy Stadtmiller, and other xoJane contributors weighed in regretfully on the commodification of personal experience from new writers, which was pretty much the business model. Stadtmiller wrote in an article for The Daily Beast, “I for one think the site’s death is a blessing.” 

That the site was shuttered in 2016 makes sense. It was extremely of its time, the height of Obama-era pop feminism. The future was female and xoJane was a place where women could Be Selfish. We’re so bad, was the tone. It seemed to rebuke imagined pieties—a frowning strawman out there somewhere telling women they could not like eyeliner.

If you had a desk job in the 2000s, you probably read it. I read it sometimes, cycling through Gawker, The Awl, Clickhole, Jezebel, The Hairpin, and so on. It was in the rotation. Cat Marnell was funny and could write. The rest was mostly trash, but trash that could help you kill ten minutes at your desk. Which is what a lot of people used to want from the Internet.

At the end of June, I decided to find out what was going on. I looked again at the VF piece. It contains a photo of Pratt smiling at a conference room table with three young women. The caption calls them “the staff.” Minor sleuthing revealed one of them to be the social media manager for the site. Another is Rafaelian’s daughter, Ani Ferlise, who posted the article on her personal Instagram with a caption asserting that she’d been working on the site “for the last YEAR” but not specifying her role. The third seems to be a model. I could find no proof that the third woman actually worked at DeedDa (she did not respond to queries via Instagram), but I couldn’t disprove it either.

I DMed Pratt on Instagram, emailed her at an address provided by a PR person they'd worked with around the time of the VF article. I messaged Rafaelian on LinkedIn and Instagram, emailed the press contact at Metal Alchemist. I reached out to the social media person in the photo, though she had scrubbed any mention of the site from her accounts—her LinkedIn now lists her as head of brand marketing at Metal Alchemist. Was there a new launch date, I asked? My queries were unanswered.

I found out more about Carolyn Rafaelian. A site for a restaurant she owns in Newport, RI describes her as “an American-Armenian entrepreneur and businesswoman who oversees multiple entities including her latest ventures Metal Alchemist, a jewelry brand, and Deedda [sic—the third D should be capitalized], a content site.” After the bankruptcy of Alex and Ani, and in addition to Metal Alchemist, she launched another brand, &Livy, named after her third daughter.

The restaurant page also notes that Rafaelian owns Belcourt Castle, a 60-room Newport mansion modeled after a hunting lodge at Versailles. I have been to Belcourt Castle. I toured it as a kid once, on a family vacation. At the time, it belonged to people called "The Tinneys." While the house made claims to historical authenticity, almost every object in the place was a reproduction. All the vases, the art, the furniture, the 22-foot gilded coach sitting in the drive out front. I remember making fun of it with my family, mocking the elaborate and Gatsby-ish mansion where absolutely everything was fake.

“I believe there is no such thing as coincidences,” Rafaelian told Forbes in a 2019 article about investing in Ice Cube’s 3-on-3 basketball league. “Everything is strategically and divinely coordinated.”

The last week of June, I heard from Rafaelian’s rep, Jason Leone. My hunch was confirmed: DeedDa had been delayed indefinitely. "With the demands of Carolyn’s new &LIVY and Metal Alchemist brand launches, we have decided to pause the DEEDDA launch until further notice because that requires appropriate time and timing,” he wrote. “We are currently working on the site and will keep you informed of when it will be live.” Weeks later, when I pressed once again, he revised this statement to say the site would launch in 2024. He also told me that everyone in the VF picture “does in fact work for Rafaelian brands” but would not specifically confirm that they worked at DeedDa or tell me what their job titles were. I sent one more email to Pratt to see if the site was not in fact delayed, but dead. She didn’t respond.

I also alerted Leone that the site still advertised a June 7th launch. "I thought that was removed," he replied. No one was paying attention to DeedDa, not even the people involved.

Currently, digital media is in crisis. Earlier this year, Buzzfeed News shut down and Vice Media declared bankruptcy. Twitter has gotten weirder and less useful. The industry braces for layoffs and the layoffs come. Journalists lament it online, but we no longer write “someone hire them!” about our unemployed friends. There are no places left to hire anybody. Part of the problem is billionaire owners. They buy publications, find the business tricky or boring or unprofitable, shut them down.

Women's media has also changed. The zeitgeist has moved from websites to social media. Part of my fascination with DeedDa was that it seemed dated as a concept. Much like The Messenger, it was an effort to graft a profitable business model onto a medium whose moment has passed. Pratt has made a career of co-opting women’s rebellion and selling it back to them, defanged and glossy.

What happened to DeedDa? Was there a showdown in the Tribeca office? Did Pratt and Rafaelian have some sort of conflict? Creative differences? Did someone realize that confessional writing cannot sell clogs and cashmere sweaters? That 15 to 20 original pieces a day is an unsustainable pace? Was the media company always as fake as the mansion? Or is it just that rich people are capricious, get distracted starting jewelry brands one after the next, and don’t have much time for the humble content site…

We may never know what happened, but my guess is the site won’t ever launch. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am. I hope DeedDa appears as promised at some unspecified date in 2024 and awes us, like xoJane, with its terrible taste. If it does eventually launch, I will be the first to read Cher's essay. It Happened To Me: I Am Cher. I probably won't buy a bracelet though.

The Dirt: Maybe the real DeedDa was inside of us all along.